Dropped DSL and missing e-mail: two tales of moving woes

Two Ars staffers recently moved to new homes. Taking their broadband …

Dealing with ISPs and the assorted headaches that come along with having broadband service are a way of life for most of us. When you rely on a steady broadband connection for your job and your livelihood, what might otherwise be nagging connection drops or e-mail snafus become blood-pressure-raising, hair-pulling struggles.

In recent months, Science Editor John Timmer and Senior Editor Nate Anderson moved to new homes in Brooklyn, New York and Wheaton, Illinois, respectively. Being the conscientious technology writers that they are—and knowing that they'd need to hit the ground running in their new home offices—they made sure to do what they could to make the broadband transition from one home to another go as smoothly as possible. Despite their best efforts, the transition was anything but smooth.

Here are their tales.

Borough to borough: John Timmer's move

Verizon is missing some wires

I've had an e-mail account with Verizon since back when it was Bell Atlantic—in fact, both the @bellatlantic and @verizon addresses still worked, at least up until moving day. When I moved recently, I decided to go with Verizon DSL, as Time Warner has a poor reputation in New York City, and I had plans to move to FiOS when it became available. I figured it would be a simple matter of shifting my existing service, with a small possible complication: I'd need services at both addresses for a couple of weeks during the move. Man, was I ever wrong.

Problems started when I looked into obtaining service at the new address. Verizon happily let me place a DSL order, but as soon as local phone service was added, there was a problem: I was too far from the local office. This was a bit mystifying, since we were in a densely populated area of Brooklyn. Somewhat oddly, Verizon would let me add DSL to the address, but only if we didn't tell them that it was going to run down the same phone lines as our phone service. So, I went with that, and crossed my fingers.

As far as we could work out, the company knew that they could provide DSL to the address, but couldn't cope with the fact that, since it was a new construction, there was no actual wiring in place. As soon as their system tried to assign DSL to our number, and hence the nonexistent wiring, it freaked out, and nobody at Verizon could calm it. Once someone actually came to Brooklyn and ran physical wiring for the phone service, it was no problem to add DSL to the line.

Problem solved. But the fact that several Verizon representatives didn't seem to understand how its own systems operated should have told me something. Sadly, I wasn't listening.

How hard can e-mail be?

Once I moved, all I had to do was move my e-mail account to the new DSL service, and then cancel service at the old address. I could have started using a new address, but, as I mentioned, this one was so old that I can't even begin to figure out how many accounts, subscriptions, and old friends have it. In fact, it was so old, there weren't many free e-mail services available when I started using it, and their long-term viability was uncertain.

In an ideal world, I'd have used this as an opportunity to switch to using Gmail or Yahoo and free my mail from ISP dependence. But moving was keeping me very busy, plus there seemed to be little reason to change, and no obvious reason why it shouldn't be simple to move an e-mail address. What I was about to learn is that there were a whole load of not-so-obvious reasons.

After a total of two hours, I was back at square zero.

My first attempt at matters brought me to a technician who said the old account needed to be cancelled in order to move the e-mail address; I accepted his offer to transfer me to billing, cancelled the account and its associated phone service, and then was transferred back to a different technician in the support group. He attempted to perform whatever wizardry was required, got stumped, and then bumped me up to level 3 support. That person informed me that canceling my account was the last thing I wanted to do; he'd have to restore it in order to retrieve the e-mail address, then kill it again.

Given the impression that I was dealing with someone who knew what they were doing, I got off the phone, confident that matters were well in hand. Two weeks later, we got a bill for service at the old address. Not good, especially since we'd already handed over the keys to that apartment—everyone in a 24-story building could have been using it as a free phone service for all we knew.

So, it was back to the phones, where I managed to get bumped up to level 3 support quickly. The technician went through a now familiar routine of figuring out what I was trying to do, and listened as I'd explained why canceling my account had been less than satisfactory. He then put me on hold as he performed whatever incantations he felt were necessary. The hold turned out to be unusually long, and the tech sounded notably less chipper when he returned to the line.

Loyalty and its discontents

It turns out, ironically, that my long history as a loyal Verizon customer was a problem. Back when I first got a DSL account, the username/password combination handled everything: my e-mail account, the PPPoE sign on, you name it. Since then, the company had changed its name, changed its e-mail service provider and, most importantly, changed how it handled account information, separating e-mail completely from the more general account details. Their systems had managed to keep my account hobbling along, but was apparently incapable of doing anything else with it.

The only option, apparently, was to keep the account open to one degree or another; I was told I could do so cheaply by converting it to a dialup account. When I indicated that I was not interested in paying additional costs for something that should be a basic service, I got transferred to billing, where I waited on hold for a long time. Billing transferred me to a contractor they used for e-mail services. After a half hour on hold, the contractor picked up, said they can't handle these sorts of issues, expressed annoyance that Verizon kept dumping people on his company, and transferred me back to Verizon.

Except he transferred me to an inactive phone line. After a total of two hours, I was back at square zero.

So, I tried again, moving from support, being told I needed to deactivate my account, and getting bounced to billing. With that account killed, they disconnected me without returning me to tech support.

At long last, resolution

At some point, while venting about the situation to the Ars staff, I received some excellent advice: take the complaints to Twitter. The service's character limit forced me to use several tweets to fully express my outrage, but using Verizon's name in vain repeatedly brought my plight to the attention of the company's public policy blogger, John Czwartacki. Czwartacki said that this shouldn't happen to anyone, and e-mailed for my details

The difference was night and day. Within days, I had a dedicated Verizon technician calling me to update me on the progress, freeing me from the hours spent on hold. It took over three weeks to eradicate all traces of my former account from Verizon's various systems, but she kept me informed throughout the whole process, and even ensured that mail sent to my @bellatlantic address would find me.

If there were any doubts that Verizon has helpful dedicated people, this experience put them to rest. Unfortunately, I know that I'll never encounter any of them the next time that I have a problem that requires me to dial in to the standard tech support line.

99 Reader Comments

Wow, I moved back in 2005. Was easy - took my old cable modem from my old house, brought it to my new one, called up Cox and had them transfer the account and assign a new name (it was in my dad's name). Still kept my email and all that stuff. They gave me a new static IP address to setup on my server and that was it. Maybe 2 hours of downtime.

When I switched from AT&T to Comcast, it was a nightmare. They gave me one date and said everything would be fine and dandy. Then on that date, they cancelled my order since I had some special feature on my AT&T (BellSouth) phone line. So, I had to call AT&T and have them remove that feature (but leave the account active). Then had to call Comcast again, and they said it would take another 5 days! AT&T was cancelling service the next day, and I'd have to pay for another month to get them to extend it past that.

But, thankfully, Twitter to the rescue, and @comcastcares was able to hook up a new connection the following day (including phone with a temporary number), and they dealt with AT&T, and they switched phone numbers to the AT&T number later that weak.

Don't get me started about AT&T. I would do unspeakable things to get UVerse... my house is technically able to get it, but only the lower tier due to distance.

This is because the wire-route for the pole that I'm connected to loops around the hood and all the way down the street.

There's a second pole equidistant from the one I'm hung from now. That pole, assuming it feeds in the most logical route, is about 1800 feet or less from another VRAD, but apparently AT&T is unable to attach me to a different pole and flip whatever switch to move my "line" over there (I have no voice service so I actually have zero service with them currently).

Instead, I'm stuck with Time Warner, who can't figure out switched digital video to save their fucking lives. Their tech support department is worthless and always tries to kick anything with a removable cable card to a specialized department, with limited hours, that is apparently unable to make return phone calls even after they have promised them multiple times.

AT&T has a willing customer and they can't be bothered to invest the time to hook me up.

Hey, these types of screwups don't just happen with DSL companies. Lost orders, support calls, promises to "look into the matter and call you real soon" are all part and parcel of every business it seems.I recently went through a very similar run-around with Home Depot over a lost rebate, only it took 8 months to resolve. Best advice I can give is to be a complete and utterly stubborn-headed, tenacious, this-close-to-being-an-ass pit bull about it, and writing them some very detailed and to-the-point complaint letters. Outline what the issue is, what they need to do to fix it, and stress you'll settle for nothing less or you'll keep going higher and higher in the food chain, and threaten them with media exposure and small claims court.May not work all the time but it did with Home Depot. Oh, and I got some pretty quick action when I involved their Twitter presence in my complaint... Twitter seems to be useful for something, it seems!

For anyone who already has DSL with AT&T and is having line or speed problems, don't waste your time calling them. There are AT&T line techs who hang out in the dslreports.com forums (check the "direct" forums under each region) who are much more helpful than anyone you could get on the phone.A few years ago, one of them ran a line check on my line, and said there was a high frequency short. Between (a) reducing the number of DSL filters on our voice phones, (b) upgrading to a new DSL modem, and (c) any line work I don't know about that AT&T might have done as a result of that line check, my DSL line went from a limit of 768kbps down to 1.5mbps with room to spare.

To be fair, anyone who has worked in the first few tiers of ISP support for a major ISP knows that these techs, while honestly trying to help, have fairly limited access and abilities, both within their own system, and with dealing with customers. For example, the minimum wait on Comcast phone installs is something no lower tier Comcast tech can bypass, regardless of the situation. That being said, you should have been informed about the features before they started the install process.

I've had my share of DSL and cable hell. At my last apartment Qwest somehow put me in the 'can't get service' column despite my having checked before signing the lease and telling them that neighbors either side of me get DSL. I could never get through to a tech able to figure it out.

That left me in the clutches of Comcast, who wouldn't activate my cable modem because it had been registered under my wife's name at my old address, and took 3 hours to actually get me signed up once I had a new modem.

My hate for Comcast got a lot smaller when I started paying for a business-class connection. The service is fast, the billing is always correct, and the support people are on-shored, smart, and accessible.

It's not that ISPs suck--it's that their consumer-grades services suck.

Maybe you guys do need some more competition. In my area of Canada there's usually at least 2 pretty good ISPs. Shaw has been fantastic for me, no download caps, free upgrades, no service outage, fantastic customer service. Can't wait until DOCSIS 3.0 gets fully rolled out, 100 Mbps!

My hate for Comcast got a lot smaller when I started paying for a business-class connection. The service is fast, the billing is always correct, and the support people are on-shored, smart, and accessible.

It's not that ISPs suck--it's that their consumer-grades services suck.

In general, at least in Washington, Comcast tends to hire as much for customer service ability as any technical aptitude. This means that while they are willing to train someone, there is a lot of experience missing in the front line residential techs. These are people who generally want to help, but don't have the experience to solve more complicated problems easily.

Arstechnica tends to be the exception, but this tends to pay off for Comcast, as most customer are actually as interested, if not more so, in a tech who is legitimately concerned with the customer as opposed to a technical wonder.

It should also be noted that the techs who handle the internet services also tend to be tasked to digital voice and some television, so for techs who come in without their own wealth of experience, split time means split experience gains.

When you start talking about the more specialized groups, like Business Class and such, you tend to get more experienced and specialized techs.

I am using TWC right now in San Bernardino County, and for the last ten years I have been calling both AT&T and Verizon as well as Speakeasy in an effort to get DSL or more recently FIOS or UVerse service, I get the "check back in 18 months" response... I am just to far away from the CO for anything better then 128k or ISDN. I would love to drop TWC like a bad habit and use someone else but no one seems interested to service us here in the boonies...

on a related note, Verizon apparently got CalTrans to piggyback their FIOS backbone in the north end of the IE here along the 210 freeway and as I live but a short 3 blocks north of it I thought that maybe JUST maybe I might get it here... nope its a long haul from somewhere to somewhere, just not here.

AT&T gave me DSL way back in 1998. But a year ago I switched to Cox and saved about 50 bucks a month off of the Dish Network and AT&T systems I was paying for. Cox had made me angry several years ago with random price hikes, but they are behaving themselves these days. Oh, and 20 meg download speed! :-D

former AT&T Tier Level II DSL Support Tech here: I've dealt with both situations and they are both harrowing. The depts are so compartmentalized that you just wanna throw you headset and go home.

i don't know about the old 'crufty' wiring in your house. I've seen some pretty shitty historic office buildings get great service sans new wiring. they need to get out there and check your pairs. The phone techs have tools that allow them to check your connection. these results are pushed to the digital services group. if they find you line status unacceptable, then they'll send a telephone guy out to pull new cable.

"I was told I could do so cheaply by converting it to a dialup account. " jeez, how many times did i say that? thousands. but that's what we were told to say. Canceling an account DELETES your email. You got lucky. Most times a call from Jesus won't get your old email back.

Many businesses actually user their @bellsouth.com address as their BUSINESS email address. so when they upgrade buildings and the account is closed, they lose EVERYTHING. I always told them to use googleapps or roll their own domain.

I was told by Qwest for three years that I would have DSL service at a new house we were building. It wasn't until the day we moved in that they admitted that there would be delays. Nine months later, and I still don't have service. It's not for lack of spending time on the phone with them - sometimes for hours at a pop. It's the same frustration reported here: every new agent has a different story and none can actually help. I've been told that I'm already wired for fiber (I'm not) and that they just need to enable it, that the lines in my house aren't up to it (they're gigabit Ethernet), that I'm too far from the DSLAM (it's less than a mile away and I connect at my old modem's maximum rated speed), that they'll call back when they have more information (they never do), ...

As far as I can tell the real problem is that they ran out of upstream bandwidth and can't be bothered to install more, despite having access to government funding for it. Regardless, it's the same story: no service. Oh - and dialup over their lines maxes out at 19.2kbps (on a good day). Welcome to 20 years ago.

I had AT&T DSL put in a new home. All I wanted was a dry line and 6MB DSL service (which the modem identifies as 8MB btw).

We schedulked an onsite installation, after explaining to them repeatedly that the home's internal phone lines were in a central box, and not connected to any outlets as all had been converted to ethernet by the previous owner. There was a line coming in from the outside (actually 2), but it did not terminate into anything, and though they intended to send me a modem (which I had to pay for, since i refused a contract commitment), I could not plug it in, so an in-home service installation (which was advertised as free) was required.

1st appointment, i take a half day off work (I bill above $40 a hour btw, so this is no small inconvenience), and no show. I call, and they say "the technician was at your house 2 hours ago and completed service." BULLSHIT, I was out in the yard mowing the lawn and working in gardens in the front yard for 3.5 hours. No service truck ever even drove by. Come to find out, the technician scheduled had actually come by early in the morning, did the outdoor hookup, and left without even putting a sticker on the door. I didn't find this out until 3 days later when a second technician did the SAME THING, never ringing the doorbell to inform my wife he'd arrived.

3rd appointment, no show. Engineer had a "family emergency". Now it's the day I'm moving in, and I have no internet, which also means no phone, and I'm a 24x7 support contractor who requires high speed internet as part of the job... Wife and baby move into new house, I sleep in old one on an inflatable bed for the next 2 nights, at least, until the lease ran out and the landlord had cable turned off which cut off my internet there. Still, noone has called back to find out what they can do about coming IN the house to make the propoer connection. Each missed appointment (4 now, including one where they promies an engineer would come after hours that also never heppaned and the local dispatch knew nothing about), earned me 1/4th month credit (a whoping $7) which AT&T argued only 2 were actualyl "missed" since someone did in fact show up to make a hookup (though didn't read the workorder).

Apparently, part of the issue is the difference between AT&T and the old BellSouth. The local offices are the old system, and workorders and technicians notes don't transfer from one to the other. The local crew is not informed of "in home" installation requirements, as that is handled by the phone company, not the DSL agents. Well fuck, if the DSL agents are not doing PC setups inside, and all they're doing is hooking up a pair of copper wires anc checking a signal outside the house, then they ARE fucking telco workers, not computer geeks.

nearly a week went by before I finally just went to radio shack, bought the appropriate components, and installed my own inside wiring. I issued myself a bill from my own company for parts and services, for a $150 home run single line drop, and sent the bill to AT&T.

Even after all the missed appointments, it took 3 months for the credits to appear on my bill, they also tried to bill me for the nearly 2 weeks total they said i had service (from the day the modem arrived), which took 2 months to come off my bill, and it's STILL coming as a second bill, not included on my existing iPhone contract bill thus I'm not yet getting unity service, nor do i get my wife's teacher discount on the DSL service, something after 5 months we're STILL trying to get worked out.

uVerse is in the process of burying wires in the neighborhood now, hoping they'll have service up by summer here. It's still AT&T, but maybe going through the motions allover again, they'll fix half of what's broken. I'd simply switch to Time Warner, but at their rates, poor quality of service, poor QoS and bandwidth availability, and extra charges for not also subscribing to cable (sattelite is not only about $44 cheaper per month, but even in a near monsoon i still get signal, the sattelite rarely if ever studders, which can NOT be said for time warner which stitters at even the hint of lightning), there's simply no way I'm ever going back to TWC.

The DSL line is not great. 8dn/512up and on my best runs I get 3.8dn 230up, and usually less, with nearly 1% packet loss. Hopefully new lines from uVerse will fix that this summer, as well as more than double the bandwidth (I stil won't get their TV service, currently sattelite is still the better deal here by another good $20 a month).

Dealing with AT&T on anything OTHER than my iPhone has been a nightmare. But, it was a nightmare dealing with TWC as well, and Bellsouth before AT&T bought them, and don;t even get me started on Verizon of Sprint's support issues..... They ALL suck.

I got DSL from Pacific Bell (still have a pacbell.net address) in 1999 and moved a few miles North in late 2004. During that period PacBell had been absorbed by SBC, which then absorbed AT&T and took on their name.

The move went fine, once it was set up. The hard part was getting AT&T to accept that my new address was in their territory. For some bizarre reason they kept insisting it was Verizon's region and Verizon said it wasn't their wires at that address.

A bit of investigation revealed that the border where Verizon was the service provider was almost three miles away from my new home and that my new neighbors all had AT&T lines. Once AT&T accepted this the move order was no problem and bloodshed was kept to a minimum.

That worked out but I've been prepared since before then for a change to a different ISP if I had to move unexpectedly. (I just found out last week my landlord hasn't paid his mortgage since last September, so the day may be looming.) I have the combined fortune/misfortune of having a very rare surname, so securing a domain for my name and acting as the extended family email admin has been straightforward. Currently, my name@surname.com address forwards to my pacbell address but I'm planning to make it my main address soon. Since the host is not tied to my ISP I cn change service providers at will.

I have always been surprised at companies that treat long-term customers worse than new customers. Over the years, we've had terrible problems with several national ISPs. Tech Support kept saying things like "We can't fix it because your account is too old" as if they were blaming me for being a long-term customer.

As a business person, it seems to me that you shouldn't blame someone for being a long-term customer--you should THANK them for it. But then again, I don't work for an ISP or cell phone company so maybe their thought processes differ.

It seems best thing is to periodically switch your accounts to different businesses--just keep them turning over like soil in a garden.

I can add this, The ONLY company I've had good support from, consistantly and without fail, since 1984, is Apple. 9 out of 10 the first call gets me forwarded to the right party (or more recently, instead of waiting on hold, they call ME, at a PRESCHEDULED time, often as little as 15 minutes from the time I request it).

Their "level 1" support people can typically handle most minor issues on their own. Billing and shipping can be handled by the same person you talk to. If it's a tough question, there's an expert handy, and they almost immediately join the call. When I've been disconnected, they have actually CALLED BACK to reestablish the call! (wow, such a novel idea, ask for a callback number, then actually USE IT).

I don't call apple support regularly, in fact, I'd say probably not even once a year, and usually it's for my father's Mac not even my own, though any computer will have common hardware issues and that's been the bulk of my calls to Apple. Also had a call on an AirPort Express once (fried), and 2 support calls for the iPhone (including them replacing mine for free 7 months out of warranty), and calls on an AppleTV (bad HDD).

They OFFER concessions, instead of making you ask for them. "reformat" is typically a last resort, not a diagnostic step, and they'll actually HELP you restore your data, including for people like my father, telling them how to set up and make a backup first (even before Time Machine was available).

When they say they're going to call back, they do. When they promise a discount, refund, or credit, it shows up in your bank records sometimes within hours. If I need hardware repair, they cross-ship the parts if they're user accessible and pay for shipping both ways, or they offer me a concession since the closest apple service center is a 3 hour ride (there's no Apple store in this state yet, and the 2 local retailers (1 and 1.5 hours from the state capitol) don't do warranty repair. Usually it's free software (like an iLife upgrade), but I've been offered extentions to apple care waranties, free apple care warranties, and in 3 cases, completely free replacements or free repairs outside of the waranty timeframe.

They're VERY interested in making the experience painless to the consumer, and if they can, they'll just as quickly log in to do the repair themselves as opposed to walk you through it.

I've been an Apple user since 1981, a PC user since '82, and a Mac user since '84. My primary job for the last 14+ years has been microsoft systems and network support, for large and small companies, (lately with a lot of Unix, Linux, and AIX thrown in, and now I'm focussing heavily on z/VM) and I rarely work on a Mac, but after being without a Mac in my own house for 3 years (still had to support Dad's though), and just getting a new one last month with 10.6, I'm now completely ready to replace every PC in the house with a Mac, and as much hardware as possible with Apple systems. I could only hope that one day they offer ISP services as well. I'm looking forward to see what the pricing of the iTunes subscriptions might be (and if they'll carry local chanels and sports).

I work for Cablevision, but am not speaking in any Official way. All I have to say is WOW, I hear all the time how bad the other ISP's are, but damn, something as easy as an email move takes like 3 minutes to do, or as long as it takes to verify the old and new addresses.

Like someone else mentioned, we actually thank our long term customers for staying that long and 90% of our issues can be dealt with at the tier2 level, where I work at. Everything else is in a 24-72 hour fix range and those Tech do call as it's part of the way they are rated for performance. Is our service perfect, by no means, but at least we try and take care of the customer on the first call, not the 5th.

Originally posted by doormat:Wow, I moved back in 2005. Was easy - took my old cable modem from my old house, brought it to my new one, called up Cox and had them transfer the account and assign a new name (it was in my dad's name). Still kept my email and all that stuff. They gave me a new static IP address to setup on my server and that was it. Maybe 2 hours of downtime.

Same here for Insight Cable. Told them when I was moving, picked up my DVR and Cable Modem. The installers came out ran new cable both inside and to the aerial tap and all was good to go. Cost me $25 to transfer (installers were on-site for 2.5 hours).

I believe that you will often have a better experience with the regional than you will the national carriers.

Both their 'systems' for handling installations, changes, etc. seem to be built entirely with dried dog turds and chicken wire. No one department allowed to know what the other is up to. Every call you make is like you're calling for the first time. None of the agents put in any details of what you need, or what they (try to) do. Promises of actions or discounts are null and void the instant you hang up. Any account more than a couple of years old is on some legacy system that acts like a black hole.

Had ISDN with Verizon years ago, and it just quit working for no reason one time. It took an entire MONTH to get it back, calling every single day, escalating to division managers and beyond nearly every time. They simply could not figure out their own systems, and constantly required us to tell the whole stupid story from the beginning. Their labyrinthine bureaucracy was astonishing in its ability to deny us what we were paying for and desperately needing. We learned to get the first and last name of every person we talked to and never ever rely on any of them calling back, no matter how far we escalated or how sincere they sounded.

DSL seems to have never improved regarding the distance measuring. I learned that unless a tech actually physically comes to your location and tests the wires with the right equipment, all other 'estimates' of the cable length should be considered outright LIES.

I have AT&T business DSL service in a Chicago suburb as well. It seems that all of their advertised 6mbps service is only 5mbps. Yes, it's stable (or has been since they fixed a bad connection with a ground loop on a pole somewhere down the street), but as far as I'm concerned, this is misleading advertising. I'll bet that NO ONE gets the full 6mbps. I've been tempted to complain to the state authorities to see what an investigation shows. Any bets as to the outcome of such (other than it not happening because of a "lack of complaints")?

I had an issue arise with Qwest a few years back where we had a combo DSL, landline, cell phone setup and I had lost my phone. I spent several hours on the phone trying to get resolution to no avail. Now, I had worked at MCI from 1997-2002, so I know a few things about talking to the LECs and the long distance providers. The 3 best acronyms you can toss their way to see resolution are: PUC, FCC and BBB. The Public Utilities Commission handles everything instate, the FCC handles anything that crosses state lines and the Better Business Bureau of course, everyone knows about.

Amazingly, the manager who had been telling me she couldn't do anything for me or give me any form of credit magically gave me an instant $20 credit after I threw those out. I ended up with a couple more of those, plus I reported the charge they had put on my credit card as invalid.

If there was decent naked DSL service here in the Louisville area I would, but I didn't see anything when I was moving here that was superior to just picking up Insight's cable internet when we got cable service.

This is a case that highlights the need for a government sponsored/funded wireless broadband in the US. Internet access is so important for commerce now, there should be a minimum level of broadband available anywhere for free or a nominal fee. These guys might be outliers in terms of working from home, but they're hardly alone. Lots of small businesses are impacted by access issues routinely, and that leads to real money lost. Not just from businesses who are inconvenienced without access, but because businesses invest less in online services that can be depended on.

And on a smaller level, the poor should have some kind of free access, which helps everyone in terms of efficient government. For all the services gov't supplies, it's cheaper to supply them if the population they're serving is connected.

We have the technology and the resources to do it, it's going to be useful for many coming decades, and there are public safety reasons for the government to have a line they control to guarantee access in emergencies. It is as if our grandparents decided that we didn't need interstate highways or airports or telephone lines.

But then, we can barely implement half-assed reforms of rural broadband and health care.

I had my own experience with AT&T when I moved last year. I used AT&T's nifty online tool to place a move order to have DSL and a landline activated at my new address and then services deactivated at my old address on the same weekend. The phone service switch went without a hitch. Unfortunately, it took three weeks and several phone calls to get the DSL live at the new place. Like others in this thread have mentioned, the problem seemed to be related to how old my original account was....

People really need to stop using their ISP's email and switch to something you can use from anywhere. Start telling people to use the new address now, and by the time you move again (or your ISP changes on you) you'll have people used to it.

Hell, if you have your own domain use Google Apps. If you don't, pick one of the many other mail providers that aren't tied to an ISP.

I wonder if this has anything to do with perverse incentives? Generally speaking, reps are rated (and often receive raises) based on how quickly they can get people off the phone. Generally this means resolving the issue and moving on. Unfortunately, "resolution" from the rep's PoV can be as simple as transference: passing the buck. The rep's job is "done," they had a fast resolution, but the customer is left hanging.

Obviously this isn't good for the long-term health of the Verizon or ATT, but this doesn't stop bonuses from being given to those reps with low average customer call times. I don't know if this is the case at these two companies, but I know that it is as at least two financial services firms.

When I moved, I had very similar account/email issues to what John Timmer ran into. I was told to cancel my account, by someone at Verizon, then transferred to someone else who proceeded to chew me out for canceling my service instead of transferring it.

I love me some Verizon FiOS, but they almost lost my business over the switchover fiasco.

Man, look at these stories. I've got plenty of my own. I sympathize, I really do.

You should have popped open a thread in the forum...We could have told you what you were in for. Cable companies and ISPs should always be treated as hornet nests of resources that are at the end of their rope on a frantic day. It might go smoothly, but it probably won't. Local phone companies, cable contractors. It's like an engine designed by people that aren't allowed to talk to one another.

On the upside, most apartment in Brooklyn have ten wireless networks visible from every apartment. A well-posted note can be a life saver to someone in transition. When I lived in Brooklyn, I left my WiFi open (and throttled) for guests. It was never a problem, even with NYC's limited bandwidth, and I'm sure I saved a few lives over the months.

Jay and Nate's experiences show that, when it all gets fucked up, there's nothing like complaining loudly and in public (Twitter) to get results. We had some issues with internet connectivity being set up when we moved to DC in March, and half an hour on Twitter resolved things far more satisfactorily than any number of phone calls.